1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to compilers and software development tools. More specifically, the present invention relates to the building of applications and the construction of software code.
2. Description of Related Art
The typical means of building an application or executable from source code involved a series of separate stages such as compiling, linking, and building. However, more recently, these stages have been placed under the control of a single user application that makes the process more user friendly. Such applications provide IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) that allow for building of application or framework products based on plans or roadmaps known as “targets”. Given a particular source code or file, targets that are nearly identical but have a few different settings may be conveniently generated using an IDE. For instance, when building a final version of an application from a set of source code, it may be useful to also produce a debuggable version of the application from the same source. In this case, there would be two targets: one for the final version that would be distributed for use, and another that the application designers and testers would use to attain debugging information. Other targets may define a plan to build a version of the same application that has been optimized for a particular platform.
Settings (also referred to as parameters) for the construction of such targets, such as the directory path where source files may be located, are specified through the IDE. Typically, each target had to have its settings defined separately. More recent IDEs allow that where a second target shares some settings with a first target, the first target may be ‘cloned’ such that the second target does not have settings repetitiously defined by the user. In this way, settings such as the directory path can be copied from one target to another. However, in order to track changes to build settings through the various targets, targets must be redefined and perhaps recloned, or changes must be independently made to each target. This is because, after cloning, the targets are independent of one another. Such problems often occur because of the differences often inherent in building applications for development versus deployment cycles. There is thus a need for simplifying the process of changing, defining, and/or redefining the settings for targets.